


Pins in the map

by bluebottle762



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Berthold POV, Canon Compliant, M/M, Reibert Week 2015
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 14:58:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4483733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebottle762/pseuds/bluebottle762
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are far too many pins in this map for me to count, but from the colours of the oncoming horizon, I'm unsure if he will remember ever placing them at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pins in the map

**Author's Note:**

> Originally my contribution to Reibert week 2015, but I failed it so badly and only managed the first prompt. However, given that I write a lot for these boys, I am attempting to save face and turn this into something better. I have a whole lot of headcanon for the pair of them in canon, and I am sorry in advance.

I remember clearly when Reiner entered our household.

It was the summer, maybe late July, when everything was dry and close to dying, and the coolness of dark, sod roofed rooms was a sought after relief. The farmstead was quiet. No cicada buzz to fill the unrelenting wave of bright, blue heat. That particular summer ambience was only ever present in our lives  _after_. It was a long summer. Or maybe it just felt long to my five year old comprehension of the world. Everlasting evening sun, filtered through wheat fields to cast faint shadows over the hard packed dirt that formed the foundation for my worldly understanding.

I wish it really had been everlasting. To this day, my rare happiness is still tinted rose-orange, glossed golden by sugar soaked honeycombs and seeping sunlight. Although now, the wax bears his finger prints, as well as my own – faded and scrubbed, like the wistful memory of my mother.

He arrived, trailing after my father, scuffed and worn round the edges, six years old and already hollow as dead oak. I think ‘gaunt’ would be the word I’d use now. At the time, I just thought he was sick. I didn’t find out until years later exactly  _why_  he’d looked so ill.

“Where’s Marcel.” My father never asked questions. He simply made statements and voiced expectations, never any humanising upward flick of inflection to suggest curiosity. He knew where my brother should be, the inquiry wasn’t of his whereabouts, more the reason for this apparent disobedience. Unlike myself, my brother never had to face my father’s wrath head on. Whatever offense I had caused in my infancy, it had not extended to Marcel. All the behaviour that elicited fear from me, only gained flippant casualness from my brother, which frustratingly never resulted in anything worse than a sharp word and a scowl.

“Out with the goats. The white nanny has been-” Waving my mother into silence, my father crossed the threshold proper, bringing himself into the dappled shade of the kitchen, no longer a dark silhouette against the bright grass outside. Unbidden, I scooted my chair away from him as he entered, the soft scrape of rough wood on stone, thankfully, went unacknowledged. He didn’t so much as glance at me.

“Bring him in. I brought the child.”

“Reiner?”

No one will ever know how thankful I am that it was from my mother’s lips that I first heard his name. If my father had possessed even the shred of empathy necessary in the obtuse void of his chest to address any child  _other_  than Marcel as a person, I’m uncertain if we would have fared so well.

Most children, in my limited exposure to them, tend to react to the sound of their own name. Be it dropped in casual conversation or called across a crowded street – some visually detectable response is to be expected. I think his stillness then, speaks more about his muted inner workings than I could ever hope to capture in words.

I deeply regret that I never got to see him whole.

 

* * *

 

After my brother was found and brought, we were told that the boy, Reiner, would be staying here now. That he was to sleep in the kitchen alcove, which we were to help our mother arrange this afternoon, and that he would be sharing in our chores.

Through the entire talk, he stared at the stone beneath his feet, worn and smooth from continual footfalls.

 

* * *

Over the next few days I developed a kind of muted fascination with him. Where ever he was, I wasn’t far away, quietly observing his lethargic movements and monotonous obedience. Not once did he say a single word or make eye contact. Given his pallor and milk-yellow hair - two things I had never seen before, my life until now being dominated by my family, all soft browns and dark shades – I decided he must be some kind of hearth spirit. Working relentlessly in exchange for a meagre meal and a place to lay his head at night.

Marcel, as ever, was much more flippant. Whenever they worked together in goat shed, I would sit out on the thick wooden beam of our kitchen door with whatever menial task my mother had busied me with, and listen to my brother’s attempts of getting him to talk.

My father remained as curt with him as he was with me, although, finding nothing to criticise, Reiner never had to undergo the regular spells of aggression like I did.

And so, he fitted himself into our family. A little ragged round the edges, and not wholly at ease, but never the less, he became a fixture.

I only wish his first words to me had been happier.

 

* * *

He’d been with us for two and a half months, or there abouts, and the honey glow of summer had long since creaked into the dim warmth of Autumn – all crisp air and wool against the dimming colours, saturated and deep. With August had come the first of the summer storms, thick and heavy with the charge of electricity in the air. September had taken the ferocity out of the rain, reducing it to a thin, inconsistent spread of grey skies and smattering droplets. October rain is unlike either of these. It lacks the energy of August storms, but carries more weight than September’s drizzling greyness. This rain is meaningful, heavy lit led and musical against thin window panes, dancing and enticing beneath a glowering sky of crowded greys, bunched together like old women, focused on the erratic dance with godly intensity.

It was a night of October rain, the first time I heard him.

All the heat seemed to have seeped away through the lone window of the bedroom, the curling mist pressing itself up against the glass, smokey tendrils reaching out to pry at the splintered frame, searching for a chink in the woodwork by which it could coil in through. Although the compressed warmth of the bedroom - generated and maintained through thick wool and body heat – remained un-infiltrated, my dreams did not.

Clutching at the blankets, I stayed buried under my protective layers for a good few minutes, trying hard not to cry or blub so much as to make a noise, my heart pounding in my chest fit to burst, the terror of wisping limbs and death-chill touches still coursing through my veins. Beside me, curled into a protective ball, my brother slept on. Snugly nested in warm dreams and untroubled breathing. It wasn’t even remotely the first, or indeed last, time I’d felt envious of Marcel.

Summoning the courage to roll over and poke my head out over the covers, I search frantically in the darkness for the familiar shape of my mother, only a few feet away and enveloped in a red wool blanket. The tumble of her black hair across her plain pillow is comfort enough to bring my breathing back down to something less worrying, but not enough to quell the aching cramp of fear in my gut, wound tight and ticking. I know if I crawl in beside her in search of the comfort I need, I will be reprimanded by my father, and undoubtedly punished for it come the morning.

_Warriors do not fear the dark._

Squeezing my eyes shut tight again, a distressed whine escapes me, and immediately the panic opens up again.

What if it heard me? Now it knows I’m awake, it’ll come and get me. What if dad heard me? What if dad heard me and tomorrow morning he’ll- he’ll-

A soft sound from the other side of the door stills me into a terrified freeze, not daring to breathe in case whatever it is out there catches me. In my heightened awareness, all other sound fades into the background static, my pinpoint focus absorbed with the soft, shuffling sounds, echoing against the stone floor of the kitchen.

Crying. Someone is crying.

Still trepidatious in my movement, I slide out of bed, my sock covered feet soundless on the smooth stone, muffled by a layer of darns the width of my five year old index finger.  Whatever courage has infused me must be born of a curiosity that has since fled from me, because if the same thing were to happen now, I doubt I’d care about who was crying or why. We all bear our pain. Who am I to pull it from you under the cover of night?

I am thankful that my five year old self was not yet so world-weary.

Creaking open the door, I peeked out into the grey dark of the kitchen, my eyes already adjusted to the murky starlight filtering in through the rain. What I saw did not exactly soothe me, but it did dispel my fear. Replacing it instead with concerned curiosity.

Reiner had fallen out of the alcove - purposefully or not I don’t know – hunched up against the stone side of the shelf, his knees drawn up, arms wrapped tightly around himself, his face buried in close to his chest. His shoulders shook violently, far worse than any crying spell I had ever endured. I’d like to think that, even then, I perhaps understood that what he was going through was deep, and hard, and lonely.  

Being faced with this kind of grief when you’re only five years old is complicated and confusing. You don’t understand the world enough to comprehend why anyone could be so upset without immediate cause. It’s something far too big and far too complex to manage without first-hand experience. Although Reiner was older than me, he was still only seven. Far too young to be saddled with this kind of grief alone.

So I did the only thing I knew.

Draping one of my thicker blankets over his shoulders as best I could, I bundled up beside him, wrapping myself into my portion of the blanket snugly, eager to cultivate a warmth between the two of us. It didn’t stop his tears, but I think it reached him, as he silenced immediately.

It took a long time to get any further response from him, by which point I was beginning to resign myself to the soft cradle of sleep once more, despite the chill from the tiles underneath me.

“Sorry.” His voice was choked. Thick and dry with disuse, almost like his throat had somehow closed up since whatever it was that had stopped him talking. I think if I had not been so close as to feel it reverberate through his chest, I may have assumed it was the thing of smoke, come to claim me at last.

I was too far gone to respond much beyond a sleepy hum, and I don’t remember wrapping my arms around him as I fell asleep. But he does. And that’s what matters.


End file.
